Television history programmes should use academics as presenters rather than
enthusiastic celebrities, B-list actors and “someone reading lines from an
autocue”, Mary Beard has said.

Prof Beard, a successful broadcaster, has argued that viewers would benefit from the input of lifelong experts on their subject rather than celebrity presenters, although she stopped short of calling for an outright ban on enthusiastic stars — such as Joanna Lumley or Jeremy Clarkson. Her comments follow similar comments from Brian Sewell, the art critic, earlier this year, who argued television was “blighted by ever increasing vulgarity and ever lower intellectual levels”.

He said: “The first step of BBC programme makers is to select a popular presenter, a supposedly safe pair of hands, who knows nothing of the subject, but is a friendly face.”

Sir Roy Strong, a former director of the V&A museum and National Portrait Gallery, has also spoken out against “BBC nitwits”, accusing the corporation of the “outrageous exploitation” of real academics and saying he was “sick to death” of the same presenters. Writing for the website HistoryMatters, Prof Beard argued that without using professional historians “from time to time”, television programmes would be “lost”. “It’s not that I’d want to ban from our screens the likes of Joanna Lumley enthusing about the Parthenon,” she wrote. “Or for that matter some highly paid racing car fanatic taking us round World War One battlefields.

“But we also need to claim — or keep — a place for specialists themselves, devising, writing and presenting programmes on what they really know about. All the evidence is that viewers appreciate being eyeball to eyeball with the expert.

“If people turn on a programme about Stalin’s policies in the Thirties, they like to know that they are hearing for the person who has worked on that half their lives, not someone reading lines from an autocue.”

Prof Beard, who recently worked with the BBC on a programme about Caligula, said she had never yet been asked to compromise her “bottom lines” of “no CGI, and no B-list actors dressed up in sheets pretending to be Romans”.

Prof Beard, professor of classics at the University of Cambridge, added that the “collaborative process” of working with programme makers was important in producing an informative and entertaining show. She has previously been singled out herself by Sewell for her presenting style, after he claimed “friendly faces” such as hers had become the subject of programmes.

In a newspaper article in June, he wrote: “Meanwhile, the owner of that friendly face will walk into and out of shot, climb stairs, appear from dark corners as though by chance, drive off into the distance, mount an elephant or drink a pint of bitter or, in the case of Cambridge classicist Mary Beard, trundle around the ruins of Rome on a bicycle.